There’s a lot of overlap between this blog and my Facebook page. Some of the posts here are notes on my Facebook profile, and some of the links on the side are shared items there, too.

When I was in Sri Lanka and thinking about how I was going to share the pictures and the stories I was collecting, I knew that how I presented the information would hinge on where I presented it. It was all very neat in my head: barring the occasional image that had minimal backstory, I would put nothing on Flickr, runltw would be where I put up the more personal/literary, less overtly political pieces; Facebook albums would be where I put up the “casual” collections of pictures; and I was going to create a minisite for a more formal showcase. Lethargy and time’s passing have made each of those projects a little more difficult to carry out separately from each other, but for the most part I intend to stick to that plan.

Some of the articles I’ve written recently have garnered responses so different in their respective spaces that it’s underscored the value of thinking about how different specific spaces on the Internet are from each other. The first example of this is the article Noaman and I wrote, “The War in Sri Lanka and the Left in Toronto.” I can’t speak for Noaman, but I wasn’t prepared for how overwhelming the response to that article would be — both from Tamil youth and non-Tamil activists. If we’d restricted ourselves to just our blogs, it wouldn’t have reached many people all. And if we’d restricted ourselves to getting it published in The Bullet, it wouldn’t have reached people outside academia. What was key was that we posted it on Facebook. Suddenly we were getting responses from young people, primarily young Tamil people, who were frustrated by the reductiveness of both the pro-Tiger groups and the uncritical mainstream leftists who had conflated resistance against Sri Lankan state violence government with support for the LTTE. Though I’d had many conversations with people prior to publishing that article that had made clear to me that my anxieties about the conflict weren’t unique or radical, it was still important to me that I had those politics confirmed by others invested in the conflict, especially those I didn’t know. I needed the validation, however self-absorbed it might be of me to admit that weakness.

Given the value of Facebook, then, from a strategic perspective, posting on the blog seems almost redundant. But what’s interesting is that the post I wrote about my parents, “Muslim Career Women (And Their Husbands),” attracted even more readers than the article on the war in Sri Lanka did. I didn’t put that post on Facebook, because it’s too personal for me. Since I know all the people on my Facebook list, I preferred to trust it to the relative anonymity of this blog. But my stats took a huge spike with that post — largely, it appears, because someone in South Africa posted it on their Facebook profile. But as with the post on Sri Lanka, there were few comments here. This makes me wonder what it is about Facebook that makes strangers more comfortable expressing public opinions about the things they read. I suspect it’s partly the result of the different user interfaces, and also the result of the culture of collective intimacy that’s unique to online gated communities.

And then of course there are message boards, which have their own dynamics. It’s been years since I’ve been a member of one; I found them very quickly draining, as I do online listservs. I can’t think quickly enough to be useful in those spaces, so I tend to avoid them. And then there’s MySpace, and LiveJournal, and Twitter, and Tumblr, and who knows what’s coming next week.

Each of these of online communities has a particular logic that can be studied almost in isolation from all the others. Even though I’ve left grad school, I’m still hoping to do work in digital media studies, specifically on how the Internet impacts how diasporic youth construct cultural identities. It’s also because I do so much web design that I’m looking forward to studying Intellectual Property law in the fall. Additionally, it’s useful for activists to think about how to best exploit the Internet’s various communication streams. This is one of the reasons that I’m still on Facebook, despite how troubling I find its privacy policies. Facebook remains one of my most useful tools for learning about things I wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise; it’s a fascinating mixture of casual and political that I’m loathe to give up. Incidentally, Tarek Fatah’s antics with other people’s profiles worried me enough to go back and make my privacy settings even tighter than they already had been, but that wasn’t enough to make me leave. That particular post, “On Arab(-Canadian)s and Canada Day,” triggered a few laughably Islamophobic responses on the Net, so that I’ve begun to appreciate the ramifications some of my friends have had to suffer for making their politics public online.

So yeah, this was a post about the Internets. Will it go on Facebook? No.